Characteristics of Al doped zinc oxide (ZAO) thin films deposited by RF magnetron sputtering

ZAO and ITO thin films were prepared by RF magnetron sputtering. In this study, three of the sputtering parameters, that is, substrate temperature, oxygen flow rate and RF discharge power were varied separately to fabricate samples. The range of variation of substrate temperature was from room temperature to 623 K. The relative concentration of O2 in the ambient gas in the chamber was 0% or 25%. The sputtering rate was changed by controlling the discharge power. The minimum surface resistivity of ZAO was 2.53 x 102 Ω/cm2 for samples sputtered at a substrate temperature of 373 K and that of ITO was 2.37 x 101 Ω/cm2 sputtered under standard conditions. Visible light transmittances of these samples were 89.9% and 90.2%, respectively. From these results, it is suggested that when sputtered with optimum sputtering parameters, ZAO is a potential material for practical use for transparent conducting electrodes (TCO) for PDPs